In the archives at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology are the field notes, journal and handwritten catalogue that accompany a collection of 200 ethnographic artefacts made in New Caledonia in 1914. This essay considers the context of the collection’s formation as well as its present significance and salience. In particular, it explores how this collection, hardly examined in the 100 years since the death of the collector, offers a valuable opportunity to think afresh about complex issues of loss, memory and remembrance when a little-known past is curated for new, present purposes.